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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

AI, Indices & Lincoln

1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car

Uniberp ponders:

I was bugged by the latest kaboom in AI, of the cheap Chinese knockoff of AI. I consider our current worship of AI to be the computing equivalent of a 1975 Lincoln Town Car.

So I searched for "How is AI different from searches based on compound indexes?" and found this article, referring to the traditional use of the word "index" meaning the alphabetized list of subject, keyword, etc. of a written text. The response: "I’m sorry, but I cannot write you an index for a book." occurs several times in the article

The linked article is a little long. I was surprised that anyone had that much to say about indexes, and even more surprised that there appears to be an entire subculture devoted to creating indexes. I shouldn't be surprised but I was. There are a zillion little niches of knowledge out there.

Google will use AI to answer some of inquiries, and generally they are pretty good. Problem is I can't link to them because they are ephemeral. No telling if the answer I get today will be the same as the answer I get next year, or even tomorrow. Yes, everything is ephemeral, but the wayback machine does a decent job of making web pages seem immortal.

Meanwhile, back to the car. Then I started looking at pictures of the Town Car and I noticed a couple of things.

Real Spare Tire in the Trunk Lid

Notice the substantial trunk lid support strut at the top

Why is there an oil filter attached to the air cleaner?

This Lincoln Town Car has the optional 'power vent windows', which has got to be peak decadence. AI is like that. Why search for information when you can just ask AI for the answer? Let AI do the grunt work.

2 comments:

Matthew said...

That thing (yeah, sort of looks like an oil filter) is a resonator, intended to reduce air intake noise.

Chuck Pergiel said...

Now I'm wondering how did you come by that bit of knowledge?